Usability Test Report: A report that demonstrates student’s ability to conduct a scientific test of their own instructional manual.
You will begin this assignment with your draft instructional manual.
After reading several web links on usability testing and watching a video, you will begin to think about how you plan on completing this task. PLANNING EMAIL is due in Week 15 Blackboard Dropbox by 11:59 p.m., Sunday, Dec. 5. The planning email for this assignment should include the following:
- Who will you conduct usability testing on?
- When will you conduct the usability?
You need to consider how you will begin the process of conducting usability testing, with specific consideration of how you will complete the following parts:
First, find someone (a friend, roommate, relative, etc.) who has never seen or used your manual before. Ask this person to complete the tasks while you observe their activities; you can ask them to complete a specific task if you want, or just let them do whatever they want. YOU MUST NOT AID IN THE COMPLETION OF THE TASK. Instead, you will just observe and take notes. This can be done by ZOOM or in person.
Watch what happens as they complete the tasks. Try to figure out what they do, what they want to do, and how the two match up. Pay particular attention to what happens when things go wrong. Remember also to look for what they didn’t do, but that you might have expected they would do.
You can find the report template here or below:
Write a report covering the following points, in this order, using subheadings to separate each point:
- Briefly — and anonymously! — describe your user tester, their technical expertise of the topic, and their familiarity with this manual in particular.
- Describe your user’s actions… What did you observe? What did they do that you found unexpected? What problems did they as a novice user encounter that you, as an expert user, would not have encountered?
- Focusing on the difference between expert and novice users, discuss how the manual helped or hindered the user in their activities from a user-centered design perspective, and explain how the manual might better support novice users. Where appropriate, include embedded links to appropriate pages so that we can see the causes of the difficulties you observed.
- Describe how you would make changes to the instructional manual based on your observation of the user. What things would you change? What things would remain the same?
USABILITY REPORT due by 11:59 p.m., Sunday, Dec. 12.
